A third body has been recovered from the apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis raided by police after last Friday's attacks, prosecutors say.
An undated picture purportedly showing 27-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud, taken from Islamic State (IS) online magazine Dabiq. Photo: AFP / HO / DABIQ
French media have cast doubt on the possibility that the female cousin of the presumed ringleader of the Paris attacks blew herself up in Wednesday's police raid in the Saint-Denis suburb.
Police had earlier said Hasna Aitboulahcen, 26, reportedly blew herself up in the raid, but police sources now say the suicide bomber was in fact a man, not Aitboulahcen.
The alleged ringleader of the attacks Abdelhamid Abaaoud was also confirmed to have died in Wednesday's raid. The third body is still being identified.
News that Abaaoud - a well-known face of IS and on international "most wanted" lists - and at least one of his accomplices may have travelled undetected from Syria before carrying out the attacks has raised fears about EU border security.
European Union ministers have decided to tighten checks on all people entering Europe.
At present only non-EU nationals and migrants are systematically checked by police at the EU's external borders. But now the EU will extend those database checks to EU citizens too.
Police and forensics teams in Saint-Denis after the raids. Photo: AFP
Travellers' details will be checked against data in the Schengen Information System (SIS), which lists wanted terror suspects and people linked to organised crime.
Most EU countries are in the Schengen zone - a passport-free travel area. After the Paris attacks it emerged that terror suspects had not been detected at the EU's external borders.
The European Commission has called for the establishment of a Europe-wide intelligence agency.
Paris defiance
France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced on Friday (local time) that the death toll from the attacks a week ago by suicide bombers and gunmen has risen to 130 people.
People gather at a makeshift memorial in front of Le Carillon restaurant, one of the sites of the attacks in Paris. Photo: AFP
Hundreds of people were wounded in the near-simultaneous attacks on Paris bars and restaurants, a concert hall and sports stadium.
Islamic State (IS) said it was behind the attacks - the worst in Europe since the 2004 Madrid bombings.
Demonstrations have been banned under France's state of emergency, but dozens of French artists and cultural figures have urged people to make a lot of "noise and light", by turning on music and lights, at 9.20pm on Friday (local time) to mark the exact time a week ago that the attacks began.
Tighter border controls
In Brussels, France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he and fellow ministers agreed that the EU would also tighten security over:
Firearms - to prevent trafficking of illegal firearms, through common marking of weapons and efforts to block smuggling from the Balkans.
Passenger Name Records - to collect data systematically on people flying to and from EU countries; the data could be kept for a year, instead of one month as was proposed previously.
Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Europe must exchange information on the gun trade. "We can only fight terrorism with a better information exchange," he said.
In a stark warning of the dangers facing Europe, Germany's head of domestic intelligence Hans-Georg Maassen said IS was "starting a terrorist world war".
IS had made Europe its enemy and European countries had to "assume something like Paris can happen any time".
He was concerned that Islamist extremists could recruit refugees from Syria, now housed in camps in Germany and other parts of Europe, who may have been trained in the use of weapons during four years of civil war.
-BBC
